Ocean Power Technologies, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Ocean Power Technologies second quarter fiscal 2023 earnings conference call. A webcast of this call is also available on the company's website at www.oceanpowertechnologies.com. This conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay shortly after its completion. On the call today are Dr. Philip Stratman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bob Powers, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Joseph DiPietro, Controller, Treasurer, and Principal Accounting Officer. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I am now pleased to introduce your host, Mr. Joseph DiPietro. Thank you, sir. Please go ahead.

Thank you. After the market closed yesterday, we issued our earnings press release and filed our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended October 31, 2022. Our public filings are available on the SEC website and within the investor relations section of the OPT website. This call will include forward-looking statements that are within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may include financial projections and other statements of the company's plans, objectives, expectations, or intentions. These statements are based on assumptions made by management regarding future circumstances over which the company may have little or no control and involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Additional information about these risks and uncertainties can be found in the company's Form 10-K and subsequent filings with the SEC. The company disclaims any obligation or intention to update the forward-looking statements made on this call. Finally, we posted an updated investor presentation on our IR website. Please take a moment to review it as it provides a nice overview of our company and strategy. Now I am pleased to introduce Dr. Philip Strathman.

Thank you, Joe, and good morning. We appreciate you joining us. I'm pleased with our progress on building our order book and sales pipeline. We had $2.9 million of orders, which is nearly six times what it was at the same point last year. We remain on track for our $9 million order target over the year as we continue to build our pipeline of feasibility studies, demonstrations, and future orders. Our most recent win has been the demonstration we are doing in Bahrain to show the effectiveness of autonomous vehicles when they're used in combination with power buoys and our proprietary MDA software. We just completed this demonstration and are actively discussing next steps in support of the Digital Horizon exercise. We had a nice quarter of steady progress on each component of our stated strategy, which is working. From a high level, we provide autonomous ocean intelligence solutions. These can be roaming or stationary and are usually powered by renewable energy. Our systems offer benefits to customers across multiple governmental entities, as well as customers in the commercial space. whether it is protecting offshore operations, gathering ocean intelligence, or supporting offshore developments. We reduce carbon footprints and lower operational expenses. Specific to our strategy, first, we have data as a service, where we had a good quarter on our pipeline of order activity of WAMVs. We also made progress on our MDA solution, which is now available commercially and is expected to begin to generate revenue in the second half of this fiscal year. We believe it is the start of a game-changing aspect to our business. We continue to get the most interest from divisions of the government, and we believe we are building a strong recurring customer base. As mentioned last quarter, we are working with the U.S. Department of Energy on the Phase 2 development of a next-generation wave energy converter. Specific to this project, we received the $1.1 million payment in the quarter, which is intended to be used to develop and test a modular and scalable Masson Spring wave energy converter power buoy over the next 24 months. This amount is included in the year-to-date order activity I referred to earlier. I would like to take a moment to make a few comments about our autonomous vehicle division. This division came to us via acquisition back in November 2021, so a little over a year ago. I could not be more pleased with its management team and the efforts to integrate the business with ours. Most notably, we are close to fully consolidating the manufacturing operations to our facility in New Jersey. will make us faster and be more cost effective we continue to seek opportunities to expand our customer base mostly in the government sector and oil and gas industry second is power as a service during the quarter we continue to have solid activity related to this component especially with inquiries on leasing as opposed to owning we continue to like our move in this direction since it brings the upfront investment level down significantly for our customers in addition We're having good success to date by pairing our power buoys with our WAMVs, and we expect this trend to continue going forward. Third is our strategic consulting services. We add another good quarter of activity related to consulting, especially around simulation engineering, software engineering, concept design, and motions monitoring. In short, I like the energy I'm seeing throughout the organization. We continue to position the company well with the industries we serve and our chosen verticals. With that, I'll turn it over to Bob for more details on our financials.